It is important to realise all these tests offer the best case scenario. To get similar results, you'll need to be running over a high quality WiFi or HSDPA connection. The real world reality is, of course, often very different. Nonetheless, these do offer a useful insight into browser performance.
They key take away from these article is that version 7.1 of the S60 browser is a major step forward in performance and rendering terms. It is faster than the iPhone 3G and T-Mobile G1. It is likely in roughly the same league as the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre (despite the Nokias running on lower-resourced, previous generation, hardware).
The improvement is most apparent on non-touch devices (after all, the touch devices never had the 'old' browser). Despite being released just a few months apart, the E75 and N86 have very different browser performance because they have different versions of the browser. Given the size of the improvement over the previous versions of the S60 browser (comparable to, or even greater than, iPhone 3G to 3GS) it is surprising it has receieved relatively little comment or publicity.
S60 5th Edition has version 7.1 of the S60 browser as a standard component, hence it ships with the Nokia 5800, Nokia N97, Nokia 5530, and Samsung i8910. For S60 3rd Edition, version 7.1 of the browser currently ships with the the Nokia N86. The new browser will likely ship in forthcoming S60 3.2 devices, and earlier devices may receieve the browser update via a firmware update.
Inspired by a feature found on some ot the Eseries phones by Nokia, Key Lock Clock by Dr. Jukka is an free application for the new S60 5th edition phones like the Nokia N97 / 5800 XpressMusic / 5530 XpressMusic but as the developer says it should also work on most S60 3rd edition mobile phones.
So what does Key Lock Clock do exactly? It enables you to see the clock when you press the application key on your phone. The light comes in for a few seconds enabling you to see what is the time, how many missed calls, SMS messages and MMS messages do you have and the best thing is you don't have to unlock your phone in order to see all that.
A new firmware update for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic seems to be released from Nokia. The new update brings few improvements but the key points in this update are the improved touch screen experience, faster download, second camera support for still image capture in addition to video calls, burst mode that allows people to take multiple pictures one after another without needing to repress the picture taking button and a built-in dictionary functionality with voice playback of words utilizing text-to-speech technology. So if you own a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic upgrade your phone firmware to the latest version.
Rumors around the next Nokia 5800 firmware update speak about introduction of kynetic scrolling in the next firmware update. Although this is not confirmed by Nokia yet, it will be great ti see this feature on the phone, also on other Nokia S60 5th edition mobile phones.
Gravity is the first fully-featured and native Twitter client for the S60 platform. It supports multiple accounts, Twitter Search, Laconica, posting of pictures via MobyPicture & TwitPic and wraps everything into a gorgeous looking interface.
This is what the site says and for a $9.95 application to find it's way into the S60 freeware blog it seems like a big deal and it really is. The first thing was to download Gravity and install it on our test phone the Nokia N97 and to be honest we did not expect much. After all it was presented as a Twitter client... But once we installed it, we found out it was more then that.
Recently there has been a release of Skype for 3 mobiles now supporting Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 Xpress music mobile phones. This release of Skype for Symbian S60 5th edition mobile phones is limited only to the 3 network users and will not work on other networks. While we were able to install it on our Nokia N97 we were unable to sign in simply for the fact that we were not 3 subscribers but if you are, go download it and try it. It looks promising.
Today I decided to switch phones with my friend and try the iPhone 3G for a day, while he went with my Nokia N97 for a change. Although this is not the first time I have used an iPhone, nor his first time using a Nokia S60 device I though there are some things worth mentioning from this one day experience. The things I mostly use on my mobile phone are email, browsing pages, instant messaging and document viewing. I did not mention calling and SMS since those are some of the things you could be doing even with a Nokia 1100 and practically every phone available today.
After eight days since Nokia
officialy released the Nokia N97 firmware we were able to update our Nokia N97 RM-505 (Global Edition). We are not sure if other versions like the RM-506 (Asia) and the RM-507 (North America) are able to update but this firmware has been expected very anxiously by Nokia N97 owners around the world. The first thing we noticed after the upgrade, was the disappearance of the email widget, only an empty box was left behind. We had to reconfigure it so that it returns to normal and starts showing our mailbox. While some users have complained that after the update their contacts disappeared from the phone, we did not experience this problem. For now everything seems to be ok. Although in the Nokia N97 firmware change log says that the home screen transitions have been improved, we haven't noticed any difference.
Today was a sunny day, very few clouds so we took our Nokia N97 for a spin around the block and made a few sample images and a few videos. So in order to share these sample images and videos from the Nokia N97 we upload them to our site for you to see. All the images are shot without any additional settings, we left the N97 camera on it’s defaults and on the maximum resolution 2592x1944. Same thing with the videos, we used the back camera. Here is some more information about the sample videos: audio: 0xa106 48000Hz mono 768Kbps, video: M4S2 640x352 29.32fps 2700Kbps. The video recording eats up to 25MB for one minute of recording in mp4 format.
This software release includes significant improvements in the software stability, especially email, imaging, USB detection, widget stability and display transitions. To enable you to get the most out of your Nokia N97, the release also includes an Ovi store client. Further application updates will become available soon. To get this software through your device, select Applications > SW Updates and choose the software you want to update. Additionally this software release is available through the Nokia Software Updater at
www.nokia.com/softwareupdates.
This is what the official Nokia press release said, but since we were unable to download the new 11.x.021 firmware update, at least for now, as soon as we get our hands on it we will play around and publish our impressions on the performance and improvements introduced by this update. However it seems strange that even though we checked the Nokia update site for new updates from the current version 10.0.012, it showed us that there are no updates available for the moment and the latest firmware version for the N97 is 10.0.012. OK Nokia, we will try again later.
